I believe in incentives.
For the past couple of months, I've had an incentive mechanism going. These work whereby if I don't lose weight, an evil economist (a friend who happens to be an economist), will cash a check to an evil organization.
This time around, I went with an organization that I viewed as a lot less evil, and gave myself a lot more time. Those were both relatively bad ideas, as for the first month or so, I gained weight.
A week ago, I started taking my current bet seriously. I decided I wanted to win by mid-September, and I made a strong mental connection between the organization (the washington area football team) and white supremacy.
In the last week, I'm down 4.1 pounds. I've got 3.7 pounds to go. Well, a tenth more to be under the target number. If I stay at this pace, I'll be done by September 3rd. That's 12 days before the mid-september goal.
I cannot recommend this diet highly enough.
Feel free to ask questions.
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Is there only a negative incentive? Wouldn't it be more helpful to have a positive incentive? Or, maybe, both? Make it past the goal and the money goes to this good cause (or something you wanted to buy but put off as luxury)?
ReplyDeleteThe positive end is freedom, such that any charitable contributions made in the end are free.
ReplyDeleteI've tried it the other way, and the real problem is I don't enter into the bet in the first place. There is too strong a disencintive.
Because it's all about finding the right way to manipulate myself.
IC.
ReplyDeleteI personally have joined a forum of other people willing to loose weight. But I was and am well underway and already went from 114kg to 95kg.
Truthfully, what motivated me was my knees starting to hurt from time to time. I ignored it way too long while it was sometimes the one, sometimes the other and sometimes no knee hurting, but the first time both were hurting when sitting down or climbing stairs, I kind of panicked and for the first time in a decade started succesfully loosing weight (for a period of more then two months or so).
I bought a book that pointed out many flaws in popular belief concerning the loss (or gain) of weight, dubbed "Fettlogik überwinden" (German more or less for "Overcome Fat Logic"). If I had to put its content in one word: For loosing weight, you need to manage your intake and/or your outtake of energy such that your body burns more than you add.
There is some more, but that's essentially the point. Everything else is sometimes helpful, sometimes irrelevant and sometimes bullsh*t.
For example, many people seem to believe in some kind of hunger mode. The usual "logic" goes like this: If you eat less then 1000kcal per day, the body switches to some kind of hunger mode, forcing you to gain weight. I don't know how people believeing that utter nonsense think the body is getting the energy to build new depots of fat, maybe photosynthesis?
I try to have a deficit of 500kcal per day (eating 500kcal less than I need), which equates to about 0.5kg weight loss per week. (Since 1kg of body fat equates roughly to 7000kcal.)
All of this works fine for me and enables me to feel powerful regarding my weight. I control it. I sometimes still eat too much. I then gain weight. But I can control it and start eat less and loose weight again.
Absolutely. That all makes sense. completely agree that total energy must equal intake versus outgo. Thermodynamics, and there's no magic.
ReplyDeleteThere's some question about changing outgo versus intake, and that's where some nonesense pops in. I can do caloric restriction (usually, at least) by controlling what I eat. I can exercise and control a lot of outgo. But, there remains steady state metabolism, and I think that's what hunger/starvation state is meant to be about: if i eat too little, maybe my metabolism reduces such that the number of calories I burn in my steady state reduces.
That's probably crap, but I think it is what people believe when they talk about it. For myself, if I have too few calories then I feel crappy, I'm irritable, and I cannot focus. Food solves that problem or, in a pinch, coffee.
With the incentive structure, I don't think about incoming versus outgo. Not really. I think about "can i eat less and be ok?", and "is it healthy for me to exercise today?", and the answers dependent, in part, on the force of the incentive structure. It's pretty nifty to watch my mental state change so dramatically.
William Nichols Agreed. And while our steady state metabolism can start to safe some in times of hunger, it will only do soonce the bodys reserves are depleted and even then it can only do some one-digit percent of saving. After all, where to safe? The brain? Heart? Lungs?
ReplyDeleteI'm more successfull by knowing exactly what I can and what I cannot still eat today. I log my weight and my calorie intake as exactly as possible and have some excel sheets that calculate my mean calorie use through those two inputs, meaning I have quite a good idea what I burn on an average day, in total.